I'll start.
Retail
Walmart Loss Prevention routinely bend or break rules to catch shoplifters. They have to maintain a line of sight on you through cameras and plainclothes employees from start to finish or they have to let you go. They aren't allowed to physically detain you once you've left the store. At this point they can only touch the merchandise to retrieve it but not if it it's involves touching you. Yeah I've seen people in parking lots being pulled by the arm into the store. Even saw a woman screaming and falling down and he kept pulling her into the building and say that's where he caught her. It happened in front of me and a longtime employee. When I asked him if he saw that he said, "nope, didn't see or hear shit" and kept his head down until they left.
The best way to steal is to act like you belong. Acting shifty attracts the undercover guys, usually teenagers or someone who is typically nervous gets caught. The biggest thefts are people who walk in and casually walk out with a shitload of merchandise including 10 tvs on a cart. Door greeters are only there as a deterrent. They can't physically stop anyone from leaving if the alarm goes off. If you aren't carrying a 50 ipods, you can just wave a receipt and they'll ignore the alarm. People steal all the time by going out the garden center door because sometimes it isn't manned. Minimum wage workers see it all the time but don't get paid enough to care. Sure it contributes to shrinkage and affects our measly bonus but so do lawsuit settlements. $10-$100 in stolen merchandise once in a while is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens/hundreds of thousand of loss in settlements each quarter. Usually it's some kind of negligence from lack of coverage.
Walmart salaried managers are constantly trying to screw each other over, to the customer's detriment. See, they purposely hires skeleton crews to work the store because they get a bonus for doing that. To make up for this, they'll attempt to fill in coverage by taking employees from other departments that are also shortstaffed. It's not uncommon to be pulled from your department by a manager you've never seen before to work their department and without them telling your direct supervisor about it so you are accountable for your actual work and the work you are covering. Night managers look the other way when their stockers put shit in the wrong place just to get items on the floor and out of the back room. Daytime employees waste a tremendous amount of time trying to correct this. Actually, 75% of the labor is arranging displays and rearranging it or relocating it across the store because someone thinks it looks better there and then changed their mind or a higher manager overrules them.
We don't really ever check the backroom. If an item is not on the salesfloor and not in our personal overstock bin, 99% chance we are out of it. The backroom is like the warehouse they put the Ark of the Convenant in with thousands of unmarked boxes with mixed overstock items in there, on racks 3 tiers high. Getting to them means finding someone licensed to drive equipment, moving shit out of the way because the floor is also packed with shit getting that particular pallet down, tearing the plastic, checking the box it "may" be in if it was logged correctly, restacking and rewrapping the pallet, etc. Takes about an hour and it's not worth the 50 cent margin or whatever it is.
Health Inspectors somehow always seem to pass the food sections even with a rat outbreak in the store. It took numerous complaints from customers seeing them run across the salesfloor for managers to acknowledge the problem. The food you eat there are probably came into contact with rat droppings.
Nothing is non-negotiable. Some customers learn how to work the system by escalating it higher until someone from corporate approves it. The shittiest customers are often the most rewarded.
Tire Lube Express will fuck up your car. Oil changes, tire/battery service are done by someone who likely has little to no prior or ongoing training. It's figuring it out as you go or taking shortcuts like skipping required checks and marking them as good. Stores don't like to have to fix cars that get fucked up due to the drain plug getting stripped or some other nonsense that they'll find every loophole they can to avoid paying or blame it on a different walmart when it was done at this one. Everyone learns to drive stick by practicing on customer cars when we park them post-service. Sometimes the wrong fluid gets drained and it's a sealed system so there's no way of refilling it without going to the dealership so the customer doesn't get informed unless it does not make it out the parking lot.
Military
The job of protecting the nation is done on computers 40-50 years old held together by duct tape for various reasons. They've been debugged to hell and back so not real hacking concerns. Contractors probably have some legally binding agreement that prevents us from using anything else unless they provide it at 10x the actual cost. 90% of my job involves finding workarounds to make things work when a modern equivalent can do it with a push of a button. Or troubleshooting something so old that a modern equivalent of a 100 lb machine can fit on your thumb nail. Then there are people who have been trained that way and even an interface update would erase 10 years of experience. We can upgrade to machines 10x smaller and 100x faster and productivity will still slow down for months/years because people don't learn computer programs intuitively, they learn a series of steps that always do the same thing in the same order.
Military waste
Everything military is cheap af. Probably not a real secret but anything military or "military grade" sounds good to civilians but it actually means produced by the lowest bidder with the cheapest materials. Contractors routinely underbid each other to get contracts and then ask for more money to finish because they couldn't do it with the agreed upon amount. Contractors lobby the gov't to put a shitload of regulations on us that result in agreements where we can only use what they provide and their proprietary equipment is commercially available shit that they fuck around with to make it slightly different so they can charge 50x the real cost. When the military keeps buying things no one wants or needs but doesn't approve funding for things we actually need, someone well connected is behind it. Take contractors out of the equation and dollar will go much further.
I didn't intend to write more than a few lines but then this happened
If anyone works in the hotel or food industry that knows what to avoid or how to get free shit, post it here too.
